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Wednesday, March 20, 2019

"This is our final chance," Robert Francis 'Beto' O'Rourke warned while gesticulating wildly in a hipster Iowa coffee shop. "The scientists are unanimous that we have no more than 12 years.”

While patrons of the Lost Canvas wait for the apocalypse to overtake us, they enjoy espressos, bubble tea and art classes. There are also "handmade items from local artisans" for those preparing for a world without technology after the Green New Deal, which O'Rourke endorsed in his prediction of a twelve-year climate apocalypse, has outlawed cars, planes, cows, industrial civilization and machine tools.

Local espresso hipsters weren’t too worried that everything they know will be gone in twelve years, possibly including mango flavored coffee, which tastes as bad as it sounds, because they know that Bobby Francis doesn’t really mean that the world will end in twelve years: they’ve heard it all before.

Also, on his journey across the country, Bobby had lost track of the timeline. The IPCC deadline is supposed to hit in 2030. It’s now 2019. That means 11 years and some months until the end.

Are the scientists unanimous about that twelve-year deadline until the sky falls?

Bobby was quoting the UN’s IPCC report to the espresso oppressed of Keokuk, Iowa. The only things that the UN is unanimous about are not following New York City parking laws and hating Jews.

“It’s a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the IPCC's working group on impacts, declared. “This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilizes people.”

Roberts is a South African city official who is environmentalist royalty and has sat on endless numbers of commissions, panels, teams and moots. Which part of the “science community” does she hail from? Her CV, which the IPCC site decided to take down as part of its commitment to transparency, notes that she has a PhD in Urban Biogeography from a Durban university that no longer exists under that name.

The IPCC is famous for the same two things as most madmen standing on street corners and shouting incomprehensibly at the top of their hoarse voices: predicting and postponing the end of the world.

"If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future," IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri had claimed in 2007.

In 2008, he appeared to have claimed that there was only 8 years left.

At a 2009 Senate hearing, two years later, Pachauri insisted, “we have just about 6 years left in which we will have to bring about peaking of emission.”

That would be in 2015.

Pachauri was replying to a question from Senator Jeff Merkley. A decade later, the world didn’t end. And Merkley is still warning that if we don’t listen to the IPCC, the world and all its coffee shops will end.

Last year, Merkley pushed a Senate resolution in support of the IPCC’s latest world ending memo warning that the world will end “as soon as 2040”. That’s safer than the world ending by 2015.

What’s Pachauri’s scientific basis for making all these claims?

His CV, which has also been taken down by the IPCC site, notes that he has a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Economics. That’s better than Urban Biogeography, but not exactly relevant.

As a railway engineer, Pachauri could probably make the trains run on time like Mussolini. But his apocalypses always keep getting stuck in a limbo of missed timetables and snarled tracks.

Democrat politicians keep getting their apocalypse timetables from railway engineers and urban biogeographers before wandering into the nearest coffee shop to warn that the “End is Near”.

Bobby O’Rourke claims that we have only twelve, or eleven years and change, left. And that the “scientists are unanimous” in forecasting a world without coffee shops. Are they really?

Last year, the head of climate and ecological science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab was claiming that it was 25 years. Does that mean that California has 25 years while Iowa only has 12 years left?

And yet people are moving from California to Iowa.

The year before, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis was claiming that it was ten years. If you’re keeping track, that means the apocalypse may only be eight years away now.

In 2008, Andrew Simms, the co-director of the New Weather Institute, claimed that we had only 100 months to avoid disaster. And he urged a Green New Deal, long before AOC, as the answer.

Andy’s 100 months expired a few years ago. The world and its artisanal coffee shops are still here.

“I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change," NASA's James Hansen, the prophet of chicken littleism, claimed in 2006. "No longer than a decade, at the most."

A decade later the planet is still here. So is James Hansen.

And NASA is back to reaching for the moon instead of warning that the world will end in [Insert Number of Years Here] unless we go back to the caves and cultivate tofu plantations under the stalagmites.

Then in 2009, Hansen warned that Obama had only four years to save the earth. So either by 2013, the earth was saved and we have nothing more to worry about.

Or this is heaven. Or perhaps hell, since Hansen is in it.

The world is always ending a few years down the road. If the false prophets are feeling casual, they may give us a decade.

Even two.

It’s always urgent that we sign the latest agreement, implement the latest program and push more money into the pockets of the very people telling us that the world will end if we don’t.

Warmists mock religious believers, yet their shady tactics and millenarian nonsense makes even the nuttiest Times Square cultist waving a cardboard sign seem credible. Their cult is always promising that the world will end next Tuesday and then changing it to next Wednesday and then the week after that.

The Democrats are stuck in the coffee shop at the end of the world with Bobby O’Rouke. There are espressos, lattes, handcrafted soaps that smell like rancid fat and predictions that the world will end.

This is the cult and this is its catechism.

Its priests are railway engineers and urban bioengineers. There is a consensus. An absolute truth. Put a dollar in the plate to save the icebergs and see you in church next Sunday for another latte.

Vote ‘Beto’ to save the planet from the people who have children, drive old cars and use shopping bags. The infidels who get their coffee plain black, for under three bucks, and use store bought soaps.

Stop by the coffee shop with Bobby and you’ll understand why.

"Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil," Eric Hoffer, the longshore philosopher, once said.

In the hipster coffee shops, there is no god but the trend. The mass movement worships itself. The coffee shop is a celebration of yuppie consumerism infused with spirituality through the climate devil. Its leaders are narcissists who promise to save them from the apocalypse of the good life. That’s Bobby.

Twelve years. Twenty-five years. Six years. It doesn’t really matter.

The numbers create a sense of urgency in the latte section before the next art class. Their contradictory nature is one of those mysteries of faith that all religions have. And if the prophets are an Indian railway engineer and a South African municipal official, that is the diversity which passes for lefty spirituality. Any movement that brings together different people from around the world must be vaguely sacred.

And the numbers do one more thing.

To paraphrase Mrs. Iselin, no one is talking about whether the world will end. Only when it will end.

Meaningless numbers move the debate past whether the world is ending and to the exact date when it will end. It assumes that the apocalypse is nigh and it’s only a matter of determining whether we will be reduced to cannibalism and socialism in 2030, 2040 or 2052. Until then, have another mango espresso.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Every few weeks, some political or national figure demands a national conversation about race. (Most recently, Senator Kamala Harris insisted, “We have not had these honest discussions about race.”)

What does a conversation about race mean? Invariably, an indictment of the fundamental unfairness of our country, the historical roots of racism in white supremacy, and the national guilt of white people.

Or, to put it more simply, why Senator Kamala Harris deserves to be in the White House.

We don’t have national conversations about anti-Semitism because the problem can’t be narrowed down to an easily blamed demographic. The Democrats invariably try to blame anti-Semitism on the usual suspects, white male Republicans living more than two hundred miles from a Starbucks, but the largest toll of violent anti-Semitic attacks tend to fall on New York City’s black neighborhoods.

There is no single demographic for anti-Semitism. It’s a bigotry blasted out by Farrakhan supporters in Crown Heights, but it’s also harbored by white Elizabeth Warren supporters in Chelsea. Rep. Ilhan Omar is an immigrant from Somalia, a country with no Jews, but picked up the bigotry from Arab Muslims. And some of the worst anti-Semites aren’t black or white, Muslim or Christian, they’re Jewish in origin.

Even on the internet, some of the most militant anti-Semitic figures came from Jewish families.

There’s also no easy root cause to blame it on, like slavery. The origins of anti-Semitism lie in the distant past. Its earliest example may be the biblical Pharaoh turning on the Jewish inhabitants of Egypt. Jews encompass race, religion and culture. And anti-Semitism also encompasses racism, religious hatred and cultural hostility. It’s why people of Jewish origin can be anti-Semitic, hating not themselves, but Jews.

Anti-Semitism defies easy origin theories or solutions. And those are the things that politics is based on.

Leftists try to reduce anti-Semitism to a problem of the white male majority. But even a casual glance at hate crimes statistics show that’s nonsense. The solution, diversity, seems to make anti-Semitism worse, not better. The growth areas for anti-Semitism are found in diverse urban areas and college campuses.

Nobody thinks that the Kamala Harris or Obama solution, electing a Jewish president, would work.

There’s no political solution to anti-Semitism. And it is capable of infecting any part of the Democrat base, no matter how privileged or enlightened, oppressed or intersectional, with no immunities. It has no obvious root cause that can be fixed with social policies like affirmative action. It stubbornly refuses to have its expressions be limited to the convenient ideological narratives of leftist social justice.

Is it any wonder that the Democrats don’t want to talk about anti-Semitism? But that’s a mistake because grappling with anti-Semitism would allow them to understand why their policies don’t work.

Anti-Semitism has been around for thousands of years. Its existence defies the comforting idea that we can just get rid of racism by having national conversations about it. Tribal hatreds are part of human nature. We can be better people. But we’ll never be so angelic that we will stop hating other people.

America is the least anti-Semitic, and also the least racist country in the world. That didn’t happen because of national conversations about race, but because we learned to value each other as people. There’s no sign that the constant public indictment of white people has made America more tolerant. Instead it deepened grievances, nurtured hatreds and brought division where there had been unity.

Immigrants are more likely to be anti-Semitic than Americans. Rep. Omar’s defenders have acknowledged this in a backhanded way. What this really means is that America’s approach to racism, defusing it through natural coexistence, actually works. Immigrants don’t have anything to teach us about race. Americans have something to teach them about getting along with different people.

Lefties insist on treating immigrants like Rep. Omar as being morally superior to us when it comes to racism because they come from minority groups. But, as Omar showed us, minorities, especially when emigrating from majoritarian societies, are morally inferior to us when it comes to prejudices.

Democrats try to reduce bigotry to a majoritarian prejudice, but minorities can hate majorities. And minorities (and majorities) can hate themselves. There are white people who hate white people and black people who hate black people. Bigotry spreads socially, but it can also grow in the humid darkness of the human soul. Social conditions make the transmission of racism more likely, but bad ideas can infect anyone. Forgetting that is the best possible vector for becoming infected by them.

The Democrats are more likely to come down with a bad case of bigotry because of their own moral superiority. The more they insist on their own tolerance and categorize bigotry as a Republican problem, the more vulnerable they become to coming down with the virus of hatred while denying they have it.

Anti-Semitism is one of the more common leftist infections because it’s been around long enough to be mutable, adapting its memetic strain to any ideology or group, and because they don’t understand it.

Leftists believe that anti-Semitism is a bigotry of unsophisticated backwoods racists. And since they have a PhD, and a 500 square foot apartment above a Starbucks, they can’t be anti-Semites. They know exactly what bad people look like, they have spent most of their lives studying that very question (and identifying them as white male southerners) and everything they know says they aren’t the bad guys.

That’s not just true of anti-Semitism. But it is more obviously and inescapably true of anti-Semitism.

Democrats only want to fight bigotry that makes them look good. It’s why they inveigh against anti-black racism while celebrating anti-white racism. It’s also why anti-Semitism makes them so uncomfortable.

If anti-Semitism only existed on the other side, as they insist, they could wholeheartedly fight it. And if it existed only on their side, they could just as wholeheartedly defend and excuse it. But anti-Semitism transcends those neat lines leaving them with the troubling feeling that their worldview is wrong.

And so the Democrats can neither fully condemn nor excuse anti-Semitism. They try instead to live in a world where anti-Semitism only exists on the other side, only to be reminded rudely that it doesn’t.

Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitic comments were one of many rude reminders, not only of the moral hazard of mainstreaming Islamists, and of the deeper rot of anti-Semitism among their new coalition of leftists and minority identitarians, but that the progressive understanding of the problem of bigotry is wrong.

Anti-Semitism demonstrates that bigotry can fester among minorities at least as much as majorities, that oppression can co-exist with privilege, and that national dialogues don’t make bigotry go away.

Leftists have fought their War on Racism through a narrow ideological lens. But ideology can just as easily incubate bigotry, as oppose it, based on its own biases and priorities. That is what the reaction to Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitic comments are showed. Ideology is not an antidote to bigotry. Decency is.

Bigotry thrives in tribal environments. Ideological tribalism nurtured the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and the Communists in the last century just as it nurtures the tribal anti-Semitism of the identitarians, fanatics, supremacists, and conspiracy theorists of the extremist movements of the new century.

Ideological tribalism doesn’t just make a society more bigoted, it normalizes its existing bigotries.

The Democrats have been hijacked by ideological fanatics who extend the umbrella of their cause over their bigotries. That umbrella protected Rep. Omar as it has Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and many others.

The ideological umbrella did not invent Sharpton’s gutter anti-Semitism, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes”, no more than it invented Rep. Omar’s latest bigotry outbreak. What it does is normalize it by framing existing bigotries within the worldview of its political movement.

Leftists turned Sharpton’s anti-Semitism and Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitism into the outcry of the oppressed, normalizing and mainstreaming tribal bigotries into the bloodstream of a movement.

As long as the Democrats choose leftism over liberalism, and ideology over decency, the toxic strains of anti-Semitism within every one of their factions will meld with their movement. Each outcry about anti-Semitism will lead to a backlash that will mainstream those attitudes, as the response to Rep. Omar did.

That is what Rep. Omar has been doing, trolling Jews by deliberately provoking outrage that will force her movement to either disavow her or embrace her bigotry. Like her Islamic counterparts in UK’s Labour, Omar has gambled correctly that her political allies will choose anti-Semitism over apology.

The complaints by Jews about anti-Semitism will be used to justify anti-Semitic attitudes toward Jews. The best defense against accusations of anti-Semitism by a political movement that has come to understand that a sizable portion of its base will refuse to stop engaging in anti-Semitic behavior, is to embrace anti-Semitism. After failing to rebuke Rep. Omar, the Democrats have taken the first step.

When they have taken a few more, the Democrats will no longer be a party with an anti-Semitism problem, they will be an anti-Semitic party.

Thursday, March 14, 2019

It’s no secret that the top ranks of the Democrat 2020 field have a #MeToo problem.

Joe Biden is a walking #MeToo outrage. And one of his presidential campaign leftovers was recently dumped by Schumer’s office for “inappropriate encounters”. Bernie Sanders once wrote, "A woman enjoys intercourse with her man as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously." His campaign was a swamp of sexism, sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior by staffers and political allies.

And Beto O’Rourke’s former political outreach director has been accused of rape.

That kind of behavior inspires Democrat activists to insist that we need more women running things. But the only woman that the Democrats picked for the White House had a career record of covering up the sexual harassment and possible sexual assaults that were being committed by her husband.

The victim of Beto O’Rourke’s former director was fired by her boss, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. The rapist was working at the congresswoman’s Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Leadership Institute.

Women are just as likely to cover for sexual harassment by a trusted male employee or aide.

Or even more likely.

Of the top 2020 candidates with a #MeToo scandal in their office, 2 out of 3 are female. Biden and Beto’s staffers disgraced their former bosses in #MeToo scandals after they had moved on.

Half of the top rank of 2020 female candidates had a #MeToo scandal happen on their watch.

That’s a worse statistical track record than even the male candidates.

The only 2020 candidates that had #MeToo scandals in their offices are Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. While the sexual harassment scandals in the offices of the two female senators were no match for the sheer scale of the complaints in Bernie’s campaign, there was a pattern.

Both Gillibrand and Harris had close male aides, Abbas Malik in Gillibrand’s office and Larry Wallace in Harris’ office, who maintained very close relationships with their female bosses while allegedly sexually harassing other women in the office. The relationships between Malik and Gillibrand, and Wallace and Harris, appeared to cross professional lines with both men maintaining a personal relationship.

Malik was officially Gillibrand’s military adviser, but actually worked as her driver and gofer. In between the alleged incidents of inappropriate office behavior, Malik had the keys to Gillibrand’s house and was known in her circle as “the keeper of the purse”. Despite his lack of obvious qualifications, Malik may have come to Gillibrand’s attention while complaining that he couldn’t get hired as a security guard, he was on track for a promotion even though he was really working as Gillibrand’s driver.

Wallace had also built a close relationship with Kamala Harris. He had spent fourteen years as her deputy chief when she was working as a DA. Somewhere along the way their relationship had deepened and when she won her senate race, Wallace became her senior advisor. The Sacramento Bee described Wallace as her “close friend” and “closest confidante”. Former employees called Kamala Harris and the alleged harasser “incredibly close”. Wallace managed the future senator’s security team resulting in the two of them spending a great deal of time together. His duties appeared to be light, traveling only five times on official business, while earning a $90,000 salary as her liaison to law enforcement.

When Kamala Harris published her campaign bio, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, it contained a photo of Harris and Wallace, and praise for her longtime aide’s “leadership”.

Wallace and Malik had backgrounds in law enforcement and the military, they were officially serving as advisers on these issues, but in practice were being kept around because they had an emotional connection to a senator, and possibly received positions and rewards based on that relationship.

Underlying the dubious positions of Wallace and Malik were the dubious positions of Harris and Gillibrand. Kamala Harris had climbed the ladder through a relationship with Willie Brown. The former San Francisco mayor had appointed her to positions she was unqualified for and linked her up with his donor network. Brown had also gifted the much younger woman he was having an affair with a BMW.

Kirsten Gillibrand’s appointment to a Senate seat remains one of the more baffling developments in New York politics. Obama had hoped to turn Hillary Clinton’s seat over to Caroline Kennedy. Instead Caroline had to settle for a disastrous ambassadorship in Japan while Gillibrand, a complete unknown representing a conservative area in upstate New York, joined the Senate. Gillibrand had previously only made it into the House because her Republican opponent had been accused of beating his wife.

Gillibrand was selected for the seat by former Governor Paterson, a corrupt politician who would later be accused of witness tampering in a domestic abuse case involving his own staffer. Gillibrand’s grandmother had allegedly built power through an adulterous affair with Albany mayor Erastus Corning II. Her appointment to a prestigious office remains a mystery. The New York Times and other papers had inveighed against it at the time before agreeing to let it go and accept Gillibrand as a Senate member.

Both Harris and Gillibrand got their start in politics through dubious means that potentially blurred the lines between the personal and the political. And once in the Senate, it appeared that the lines continued to blur within their own offices and inner circles. Both powerful women appeared to form personal relationships with their advisors while ignoring the allegations of sexual misconduct.

Were Malik and Wallace able to get away with their alleged harassment because of their close relationships with female bosses who had built their brands around fighting sexual harassment?

Who would believe that senators so dedicated to fighting for #MeToo had a #MeToo problem?

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, more than any other politician, had used the #MeToo movement as her platform. Senator Kamala Harris followed close behind her. The hypocrisy was stunning because Gillibrand’s staffer ended up trapped by a mediation requirement that her boss had publicly opposed. Harris’ staffer was silenced by a Non-Disclosure Agreement that her boss had publicly opposed in sexual harassment cases.

The very reforms that Harris and Gillibrand were campaigning for were off-limits to their employees.

Riding the coattails of the #MeToo movement, Gillibrand and Harris claimed that victims should be believed. Instead they chose not to believe the victims when they were accusing their aides.

Malik and Wallace were only forced out when their cases went public. The feminist establishment that promised to protect women, instead did everything possible to protect their sexual harassers.

At Variety’s Power of Women luncheon, Gillibrand had touted #MeToo and warned, “For too many institutions, their actions speak louder than words.”

That proved to be true of Gillibrand, who talked endlessly about the evils of sexual harassment while turning a blind eye to it in her own office.

Senator Gillibrand’s solution to sexual harassment was more women like her in the Senate.

“Imagine the day when we have 51% of women in congress. We only have 22 in the U.S. Senate, only 18% in the House of Representatives,” Gillibrand had ranted. “Do you think this U.S. Senate would still be doing nothing to change the sexual harassment system.”

And then Gillibrand demonstrated that having more women in the Senate would not prevent sexual harassment. No gender has a monopoly on misbehavior. Women may be less likely to sexually harass, but they are as likely, and 2020 statistics suggest perhaps even more likely, to turn a blind eye to it.

Gender diversity doesn’t fix sexual harassment. Ethics and values do.

Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris convinced women to vote for them by playing on the myth of sisterhood, telling other women that they could count on their support because they were women. But the women working for them quickly found out that the senators put their relationships with men first.

Leftist feminism is built on the same lie of gender solidarity. Diversity insists that only women can be trusted to treat women fairly, and only black people can be trusted to treat other black people fairly. And Congress makes a mockery out of the myth of solidarity through diversity every other week.

Decency has no gender and no race. Ethics has no identity. And diversity is no substitute for decency.

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

“Is it okay to still have children?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wondered while making a salad.

“It’s basically like, there is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult and it does lead, I think young people, to have a legitimate question.”

It's easy to dismiss her, but the loudest proponent of a Green New Deal doesn’t come up with original ideas, she just snatches extreme lefty ideas already being mainstreamed, and dumbs them down into a ridiculous and easily digestible form. Cortez hadn’t come up with the idea of cracking down on air travel or cows. And she hadn’t invented environmentalist proposals for human extinction on her own.

"Is It Cruel to Have Kids in the Era of Climate Change?" the New Republic had asked.

"If the looming 12-year deadline is missed," the formerly liberal, and now radically leftist publication, suggested, "what purpose could life have in the face of an unavoidable, collective downfall?"

"Bringing children into a decaying world, without even the opportunity to do something about it, seems a cruel fate to inflict on someone, especially your own child."

It was the very same argument about the cruelty of bringing unwanted children into the world that had been used for abortion that was now being deployed for a preemptive national infanticide.

But infanticide, personal or societal, of a child that exists or of all the children that never will, is not about compassion for the child. It is about the perception that the existence of the child is an evil.

The New York Times put that idea forward when it ran an op-ed asking, “Would human extinction be a tragedy?"

"It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off," it pondered.

More children mean more plane trips, more cows and more carbon emissions. Like the cows and the planes, the children must go for the environment to be saved to go on existing in splendid isolation.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If there isn’t a single human being left on the planet, does it matter how pristine the woods, lakes and skies are?

New York State rolled out a law legalizing abortion up to birth. Governor Cuomo called it a, “historic victory for... our progressive values”. New York’s birth rate had already been dropping steadily.

In 2015, black women in New York had over 25,000 abortions and only 23,116 births.

New York’s progressive values have made it a place where birth rates keep dropping and the death rate keeps rising. It’s progressively aging while its youth population fell 4% since the 2010 census.

Virginia’s Governor Northam backed an infanticide bill that would allow abortion up to birth.

“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” he told a radio show. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue.”

Virginia’s birth rate hit a low in 2017. The state’s fertility rate trails national averages. Before Obama, the state had seen 108,884 births. In 2017, that number had fallen to 100,248 births.

Rhode Island’s Gov. Gina Raimondo backed its version of an infanticide bill. The state already has the lowest fertility in the country. It also has the country’s highest rates for out of wedlock births and births by welfare mothers.

Vermont debuted an infanticide bill declaring that a, “fetus shall not have independent rights under Vermont law." In 2016, Vermont had the lowest number of babies born since before the Civil War.

Present day Vermont has 5,903 babies being born, fewer than the 6,538 babies born to an 1857 population of 300,000. Current Vermont birth rates are 30% below birth rates in the eighties.

This is what progressive values look like.

Nationally, every Senate Democrat, except three, refused to back the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act compelling doctors to preserve the lives of babies born after a botched abortion.

"I want to ask each and every one of my colleagues whether or not we're OK with infanticide," Senator Ben Sasse asked.

The answer was given.

Politicians were once known for kissing babies. Now, if they’re Democrats, they kill them.

The Democrat political calculus of infanticide is so brutally grim that it makes the infant exposure of their spiritual pagan forebears seem almost humane.

Population increases in states like New York are driven by immigration. First generation immigrants are the safest political bets for Democrats. As the generations pass, the immigrants become worse bets.

The safest pathway to a permanent Democrat majority is abortion and open borders.

Global Warming provides the perfect political cover for a policy of suppressing births and promoting migration. Abortion will reduce our carbon footprint even as we welcome in “climate refugees”.

The central idea put forward by Cortez, the New Republic and the New York Times is an ancient one.

When drought and famine struck, the Pre-Greek Pelasgians would sacrifice every tenth child in an appeal to their gods. As with modern infanticide, ideology served as cover for pragmatic policy.

Judaism gave the pagan world the prohibition against infanticide. As Judeo-Christian influences wane, our pagan ruling class which puts its faith in the apocalypses of its PhD priesthood turns once more to murdering children in a ritual cleansing to appease the anger of Mother Earth at our unclean science.

Kill 100,000 babies a year and perhaps global temperatures will drop. If not, let’s kill 200,000.

Having children is an act of faith, in the future and in ourselves. But what if you believe, like Rep. Cortez, that there is no future worth having? That the world is nothing more than the narcissistic carpe diem of the moment in which all that matters is the moment of fame and the instant rush of experience.

An interesting thing happens when we look at the children of the 2020 field.

President Trump has five children. Mitt Romney, the previous Republican nominee, also had five children. McCain, the GOP nominee before him, had four children by his two wives. Barack Obama has two children. His Democrat predecessors, Bill and Hillary Clinton, had one daughter.

Of the 2020 Democrat front runners who have officially announced that they are running, Senator Kamala Harris has no children. At her current age, she probably never will. Senator Cory Booker is unmarried and will probably stay that way. Senator Elizabeth Warren has two children. Senator Amy Klobuchar has one child. Governor Inslee has three. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has two children. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has been married twice. She appears to have no children. Julian Castro has two children. Pete Buttigieg is gay and has no children.

Senator Bernie Sanders has one son with whom he appears to have almost no relationship.

There are more prolific candidates in the wings. Beto O’Rourke has three children and Joe Biden has four. But those numbers make them well above average for a 2020 field that is light on children.

Individual lives are complicated. That is no less true of politicians than it is of anyone else. And so this is not about passing judgement or making assumptions about the personal lives of individuals. But the statistical trend lurking in these numbers paints a picture of the Democrat political elite.

Four of the 2020 candidates are childless. Only three have families that are above replacement rate. Replacement rate means that two people are doing more than replacing their own numbers. A society whose childbirth rates are at replacement rate isn’t growing. One that is below replacement rate is dwindling away. That’s true of much of Europe. It’s also true of the Democrat political elite.

The average number of children of the 2020 Dem field is 1.5. That’s below replacement rate.

By contrast, the Republican primary field average in 2016 was 3.1 Above replacement rate. The most fertile Republican in 2016 had twice as many children as the most fertile Democrat in 2020.

The Dem 2020 candidates have a total of 18 children. The Republican 2016 field had a total of 50.

These demographic snapshots are also philosophical trends. They show that on average, Republican leaders still believe in the future and their Democrat counterparts don’t. The enthusiasm for abortion is mirrored in their own lifestyles and beliefs. The future is doomed. A prematurely short amount of time from now the waves will roll over their beachside mansions. Starving refugees will flood Marin County. The future will belong to climate refugees from El Salvador and Somalia who will run the country. All the old white Democrats can do is graciously show them the ropes and implement socialized medicine.

And then have a chardonnay, short some energy stocks and watch the tide of change roll in.

Make America Great Again infuriates them with its assertion that the decline at the heart of the selfish nihilistic philosophy to which they have given their lives isn’t inevitable. And they will do everything to prove it wrong, and that their wreckage of their duty and country was right, by destroying America.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

"Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews," opined Pierre Leroux, the leftist credited with coining the term 'Socialism'. "When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce."

"What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money," Karl Marx ranted.

American socialism traces its ideological ancestry to Charles Fourier, a French socialist bigot who declared that Jews were the embodiment of capitalism, “parasites, merchants, usurers”, and the "incarnation of commerce: parasitical, deceitful, traitorous and unproductive".

Even the term ‘anti-Semite’ was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, the socialist founder of the League of Antisemites. The inventor of anti-Semitism’s arguments were the same ones put forward by Marx, Fourier, H.G. Wells, Lenin and countless other socialists. The Jews were all about the ‘Benjamins’. They started wars. They were disloyal and manipulated society. They were a dangerous foreign element.

These are the same tropes that were put forward by Rep. Ilhan Omar and defended by her socialist allies in the House Progressive Caucus and across the media. Anti-Semitism is one of the meeting points between socialists and Islamists. The more anti-Semitism she spews, the more Rep. Omar unites the identity politics caucus of minority group racial nationalists and Islamists, with the traditional Left.

Anti-Semitism isn’t just a historical relic and Rep. Omar isn’t an outlier. The Democratic Socialists of America are rotten with anti-Semitism. Before she was defending Omar, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was chatting with Jeremy Corbyn. The British Labour leader has been widely condemned for his anti-Semitic remarks and for backing anti-Semitic allies whose hatred has been even more open than Omar’s.

The DSA endorsed Maria Estrada, a California State Assembly candidate, who had praised Farrakhan, accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust, and attacked a Jewish Democrat for not keeping “your party, your religion and your people in check.” It’s unsurprising that the DSA announced that it “stands” with Omar. Socialism doesn’t just have a history of anti-Semitism, but a burning problem right now.

The DSA loudly cheered a Corbyn representative at its 2017 convention even while British Jews and non-Jews were condemning Labour’s descent into anti-Semitism. Jewish Labour members have been forced out or have since announced that they were leaving on their own. One of them was MP Ian Austin, the son of a Holocaust survivor, who condemned its “culture of extremism, anti-Semitism and intolerance”.

Also at the DSA convention was a representative from Melenchon's France Insoumise.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an ally of the Communist Party, responded to anti-Semitic violence accompanied by cries of, "Death to the Jews", by claiming that they embodied French values while accusing Jews of dual loyalty for protesting in support of Israel. Then he attacked CRIF, the umbrella group of Jewish organizations in France for accusing leftists of anti-Semitism. There was no room in France, he bloviated, for “aggressive communities that lecture the rest of the country."

Corbyn and Melenchon come by their anti-Semitism honestly. They’re the vanguard of socialist political movements that were anti-Semitic from their very origin.

Labour’s anti-Semitism problem dates back to Henry Hyndman, the founder of England's first socialist party, and then of the National Socialist Party, which eventually became part of the Labour Party.

Hyndman was refreshingly blunt when explaining the necessity of melding anti-Semitism and socialism, "the attack upon the Jews is a convenient cover for a more direct attack at an early date upon the great landlords and Christian capitalists."

The, “first we come for the Jews” approach is an innate strategy of extremist political movements.

Rep. Omar would much rather tap into anti-Semitism and turn the conversation to Israel, then discuss her past sympathy for Islamic terrorists. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez would rather turn the conversation away from why she believed we shouldn’t have gone after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with a defense of Omar. Jews are a small and controversial minority. That makes them a good target for socialists, national and international, to make it seem as if their extremism only threatens the Jews.

Not the general public.

The division between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is a scam. Anti-Zionism is just a means of attacking American foreign policy by exploiting anti-Semitic stereotypes. Attacking Israel in support of Islamic terrorism allows leftists to use bigotry to shift the argument from our national security to Jewish conspiracies. Much as Hyndman rallied opposition to the Boer War by calling it a “Jew War”.

Anti-Zionists believe that the terrorists are right and that America, Israel and any nation that resists them deserves to lose. This toxic point of view goes over better with a spoonful of anti-Semitism.

The 20th century was rich with examples of socialists not named Adolf using Jews as scapegoats for the failures of their economic programs. After denouncing Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev set out to improve his popularity by executing Jews for “economic crimes”. This was a continuation of a Stalinist program that attempted to blame the USSR’s food shortages on Jews with show trials and brutal killings.

The Jews put on trial were accused of not just selling food on the black market, but of colluding with Rabbis, Zionists and the entire spectrum of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Between 1962 and 1964, Khrushchev had over 70 Jews executed through these show trials even as the food shortages continued.

But we don’t have to turn to the Soviet Union to see examples of socialist anti-Semitic scapegoating.

FDR’s New Deal test cases focused in on Jews or Italians: two unpopular immigrant minority groups at the time. A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, the case that helped break the New Deal, targeted Kosher butchers for following Jewish religious law. The media played on every anti-Semitic stereotype, and while it won public opinion, socialist anti-Semitism lost in the Supreme Court.

August Bebel famously dismissed Anti-Semitism as "the socialism of fools". But it’s hard to have socialism without anti-Semitism. Successful socialist movements unite different economic classes. Socialists from Marx to Hitler turned to anti-Semitism because traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes made their attacks on capitalism and the free market connect with a populist audience uninterested in theory.

As the Democrats embrace the socialist dog, the anti-Semitic flea comes with it. Political extremism brings with it a host of fringe theories and beliefs. A Democrat Party that moves leftward will open the doors to anti-Semites, but also to people who believe in UFOs and that lizard people walk among us.

But anti-Semitism is also deeply linked to socialism and its ideological stereotypes, the greedy capitalist and the warmongering businessman, inescapably express themselves in the language of anti-Semitism. Rep. Omar didn’t utter new ideas about Jews, but very old ones. And these ideas have nothing to do with Israel. They predate the Jewish State and even an organized Zionist political movement.

The Jew was the classic socialist villain because he showed that free markets can empower individuals. Socialists were obliged to disprove the legitimacy of Jewish entry into the middle class by employing classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. The same problem bedevils today’s socialists who have replaced class with race, but still have to contend with the economic successes of Jews and Asians despite racism.

Jewish success disproves socialism and identity politics. It can only be met with anti-Semitism. And then the very element that disproves socialism instead becomes proof that we desperately need big government to protect us from the Jews. The same rhetoric at the heart of National Socialism is lurking there in the bowels of all socialism, from the New Deal to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In the realm of foreign policy, Israel’s successful resistance to Islamic terrorism must also be disproven so that the United States and other countries do not decide to adopt it as a model. The same anti-Semitic stereotypes that socialists used to inveigh against the Boer War, WW1 and any conflict in the last century, are once again deployed, this time using anti-Semitism to stigmatize counterterrorism.

Socialist anti-Semitism isn’t new. Rep. Omar’s controversy is a variation on an old theme. Variations on it are currently burning through the UK and France as they have for over a hundred years.

Wednesday, March 06, 2019

In California, history, like everything else, repeats itself as farce.

Governor Gavin Newsom came into office announcing that he was canceling high-speed rail to nowhere, doubling down on high-speed rail to nowhere, and pulling the National Guard from, what he called, Trump's "manufactured crisis" at the border to deal with the greatest threat to California.

Pot.

The green crosses of marijuana dispensaries in Southern California easily outnumber the white crosses of churches or the red crosses of hospitals. Every other billboard in Los Angeles is either for a marijuana store, a marijuana app or a marijuana cookie. Wealthy shoppers in pricey areas browse through MedMen, a drug dispensary whose bare wood and glass are designed to make buying drugs feel like shopping for the iPhone X at the Apple Store. (The prices for MedMen’s drugs and the iPhone X might be comparable, but the Apple Store doesn’t have four burly security guards or an ATM at the counter.)

Lazy potheads with smartphones don’t have to bother making the trek out to a licensed drug dealer. Eaze is the app that wants to be the Uber and Eat24 of drugs. Its slogan is simple. "Eaze: Marijuana Delivered." The $52 million company operates in 100 cities giving Californians the ability to get their drugs without even having to get up off the couch for more than a few minutes at a time.

But, Governor Newsom, in his State of the State address, praised illegal aliens, declared that “the border ‘emergency’ is a manufactured crisis and California will not be part of this political theater”, but that the National Guard would “refocus on the real threats facing our state”, like, “illegal cannabis farms”.

Forget the illegal aliens, it was time to go fight illegal pot.

Could the most dazed place in America have suddenly harshed its mellow? Did the University of Montreal study showing permanent damage to teenage brains from marijuana use, the University of Pennsylvania study showing lower test scores for drug users, or the Lancet study showing lower graduation rates and higher suicide rates have miraculously burst through the progressive drug haze?

Nah.

California’s new drug problem is a familiar one to drug cartels across the world. Its own drug cartel, the Bureau of Cannabis Control, isn’t getting a big enough piece of the action. Most of California’s potheads prefer getting their pot the old-fashioned way, without MedMen’s Apple Store ambiance or Eaze’s apps.

Think of them as discount cannabis shoppers. They’re not in it for the Silicon Valley shtick or the culture. They just want to get high as cheaply as possible. And they don’t want to pay high taxes on their pot.

Governor Newsom’s crackdown on ‘illegal’ pot operations is no different than when El Chapo’s thugs burst in on a drug operation that wasn’t “licensed” by the Bureau of Machetes. Drug legalization has turned California’s law enforcement and its National Guard into the enforcers for El Newsom.

California’s cartel boss is pulling the National Guard off stopping illegal aliens (who can find work in the new legal weed agriculture sector) to cracking down on drug growers who aren’t paying protection money to El Jefe to finance the fantasy of a high-speed rail to dreamland.

Not to mention universal health care for people “unwilling to work” because they won’t leave the couch.

Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to enforce desegregation. When a state abuses its National Guard, pulling it off national security duty to protect the flow of drug money to the narcosocialist cartel running California into the ground, the way its fellow narcosocialist cartel ran Venezuela into the ground, Trump has excellent grounds for federalizing the California National Guard.

If President Trump invokes U.S. Code Title 10, instead of Title 32, he can take control of National Guard troops directly, instead of relying on the patriotism of Dem governors who see every illegal alien as another vote. And that will prevent Newsom and other Dems from undermining national security.

President Trump has failed to federalize the National Guard until now. But the withdrawal of Guard units by Democrat governors gives him every reason to do so. And Governor Newsom withdrawing the National Guard personnel to act as enforcers for California’s federally illegal drug industry adds insult to injury. The National Guard shouldn’t be abused to protect California’s “licensed” drug dealers.

But that’s what California’s second drug war is all about.

The first drug war was fought because drug use had devastating social effects. It destroyed minds, spread crime and generated misery. The second drug war is being fought by politicians who think that drugs are great, but want to protect the flow of drug money to their narcosocialist regime.

The big pitch for decriminalization was that law enforcement would no longer have to focus on busting dime bag dealers. Prisons would empty now that the hoi polloi would get its drugs from MedMen instead of the dealer on the corner. Gangs would see their revenues disappear. The cartels would break up. Crime would drop. And the Age of Aquarius would finally be upon us.

Nope.

Governor Newsom has declared a second drug war because the majority of drug sales are still black market. In an age where you can swipe right to get pot, government pot is still too expensive. New York’s OTB gambling monopoly went bankrupt and an apocryphal story has the IRS losing money on a Nevada brothel. California is proving that the government can fail at drugs along with sex and gambling.

Compliance costs at the growing level alone were estimated to add $408 in costs per pound.

The Cannabis Advisory Committee's 22-member panel (the government can’t even try to cash in on drugs without a committee consisting of, among others, a fisheries attorney, four union reps for drug workers, and an NAACP president) warned that “Lack of enforcement is creating a thriving environment for the unregulated ‘underground market,’”

Now that we’ve legalized drugs, let’s start cracking down on drugs.

Let’s send out the National Guard to go after anyone who’s growing drugs without using union labor from any of the four unions represented on California’s 22-member cartel committee.

“We believe that this governor is committed to addressing our concerns, and he has a Legislature that is showing their willingness to author bills that will strengthen the regulated market while minimizing the illicit market,” declared the spokesman for the California Cannabis Industry Association.

We used to fight drugs because they were an evil. Now we’re fighting drugs and putting people in prison to protect the financial interests of the California Cannabis Industry Association.

State and city drug enforcement units are busy cracking down on unlicensed drug dealers who don’t want to pay high taxes in Los Angeles. The National Guard has been dispatched to fight unlicensed growers whose workers aren’t paying union dues. Weedmaps, an online app, was ordered to stop listing unlicensed drug dispensaries by the Bureau of Cannabis Control. Weedmaps replied that it isn’t licensed by the BCC, but that the Communications Decency Act, a Federal law meant to fight pornography, allows it to continue listing whatever drug sites it wants to without asking Sacramento’s cartel for permission.

California would have to ask the Federal government to enforce the state’s drug cartel jurisdiction laws against Weedmaps, all of which are completely illegal under the Federal laws that California is defying. But Weedmaps did the smart thing, it hired a lobbying firm run by Governor Newsom’s policy director. Now the lobbies have to fight the drug union bosses over how to best extract drug protection money.

El Chapo had an easier time getting businesses to pay protection money because he didn’t use as many lawyers. Sadly, Chapo doesn’t have a seat on the 22-member cartel committee even though he’s more qualified than all of its members put together, and could straighten out the business in a month.

Governor Newsom wants the Federal government to pay for his drug dealer protection racket. Even as he was pulling troops from the border, he had the chutzpah to send a letter to Trump’s Deputy Secretary of Defense demanding more funding for the “Counterdrug Task Force”, claiming that helping California crack down on “illicit drugs” would address the “root cause” of illegal immigration.

What was he smoking?

Governor Newsom boasts that the California National Guard has seized 71,488 pounds of marijuana. But why should taxpayers pour tens of millions into having the Guard seize pot when it's being sold legally in stores and through apps?

Why are Wisconsin or Idaho taxpayers on the hook for enforcing California’s drug cartel revenues?

Drug legalization has created a small upscale market for California’s wealthy drug users while leaving the rest of the pot marketplace in the hands of the same drug dealers who offer a cheaper product without any of the licensing and regulatory hassles of the booming government cartel. A second drug war is being fought between the government drug cartel, Mexican cartels and unlicensed growers and dealers.

History suggests that the dealers and cartels will win because the government has dismantled all the social deterrents to drug use, boosting public demand and delegitimizing the idea of a war on drugs.

The Godfather considered drugs a “dirty business”. Don Zaluchi countered that the huge profits from drug dealing were irresistible. “I want to keep it respectable,” he insisted in the classic movie. “I don't want it near schools. I don't want it sold to children!”

California wants to keep it respectable, but that’s impossible. All that’s left is greed and violence.

The second drug war is being fought between the government cartel and unlicensed dealers for control of the market. And it’s being fought by diverting the National Guard from the border for drug profits.

President Trump should take away the National Guard from Sacramento’s narcosocialists. Our soldiers deserve better than acting as enforcers for a government drug cartel instead of protecting America.

Monday, March 04, 2019

Tax time is usually an unhappy time for taxpayers, but a joyous time for government employees and the welfare class that gets more in “refunds” than it ever pays in taxes.

But this year, tax time is a depressing time for the taxmasters in the big blue states.

Blue states use high taxes to finance their frivolous spending. But this year, the money just isn’t there even as House and Senate lefties from big blue states tout new plans to soak the rich.

Senator Elizabeth Warren made headlines by building her 2020 campaign around a “wealth tax”.

Warren called it, “the 'Ultra-Millionaire Tax” and claimed that it only “applies to that tippy top 0.1% – those with a net worth of over $50 million”. That’s convenient because the millionaire class warrior’s own estimated net worth tops out at around $10 million. When millionaires like Elizabeth Warren talk about taxing wealth, they mean the wealth of the millionaires who are wealthier than they are.

But over in Warren’s Taxachusetts, soaking the rich isn’t keeping the blue state model afloat.

Massachusetts experienced a January tax revenue shortfall of $195 million. That’s down 6% from 2018. And January is the cold, snowy month that is meant to account for 10% of the revenues for the year.

December was none too cheerful either.

"While most major categories of revenue continue to perform generally as expected, Massachusetts, like a number of other states, experienced below-benchmark performance in the category of non-withheld income in both December and January, particularly in individual estimated payments," the head of the Department of Revenue announced.

“As serious as a heart attack," New York’s Governor Cuomo was much less restrained when discussing New York’s $2.3 billion plus revenue shortfall.

“This is the most serious revenue shock the state has faced in many years," State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli warned.

“Tax the rich. Tax the rich. Tax the rich. We did that. God forbid the rich leave," Cuomo groused, noting that the 1% of wealthy tax filers also pay almost half the state's income taxes. But, after tax reform, many of the rich were fleeing. Florida, with no income tax, was a commonplace destination.

New York lost almost 50,000 people last year. Florida gained over 300,000 people.

“I want to personally welcome anyone escaping high tax states to join the hundreds of thousands of their former neighbors who have already moved to Florida,” Governor Rick Scott announced last year.

“For richer people, your tax liability could have gone up now $100-, $200-, $300,000,” Governor Cuomo whined. “And there is a tipping point where people say, ‘I love New York, but to spend another $300,000 in taxes? I’ll move.’”

In the Occupy Wall Street era, Mayor Bloomberg had warned about the danger of tax hikes. “One percent of the households that file in this city pay something like 50% of the taxes. In the city, that's something like 40,000 people. If a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral."

His successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, is a lazy Marxist and clueless about economics. “Brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world," he declared in his State of the City address. "There’s plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands.”

The ‘wrong hands’ being any hands other than his pudgy manicured fingertips.

These days he’s singing a different tune.

In February, a doleful De Blasio declared that the city expects to see $935 million less in income tax revenue. That 7% drop is going to make New York City’s $92 billion budget, up $3 billion since last year, a lot more challenging. And, for the first time ever, he demanded that city agencies cut three-quarters of a billion, even as he doubled down on welfare to polish his progressive image for a presidential run.

“We have some tough choices up ahead,” he warned.

Sorry, “brothers and sisters”, suddenly there wasn’t “plenty of money in the city” anymore.

Is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who made headlines with a 70% tax rate, paying attention to her own backyard? And by that, I don’t mean New York City. The fake “Girl from the Bronx” is actually from one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country with the highest property taxes in the country. Westchester took a downgrade from its AAA rating back in the fall. Another downgrade may hit it within two years.

Home prices are falling as tax reform is hammering Westchester’s deeply flawed economic strategy. And the flawed blue state economic strategy of tax happy enclaves around the country.

New Jersey’s Department of the Treasury noted a 35% tax revenue fall. California State Controller Betty Yee reported a $2.5 billion revenue shortfall. Tax reform is in the wind. And it’s blowing away the blues.

The blue state model hollowed out the greatest cities in America by making them unlivable for the middle class. High taxes in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and countless other cities have turned them into enclaves in which you either need to be rich or on welfare to be able to live in them. And that has made the blue state model precariously dependent on a small and very wealthy tax base.

Lefty politicians solve everything by spending more money and raising taxes on the wealthy. Tax reform made that an unsustainable strategy because, suddenly, red state taxpayers weren’t covering blue state tax bills. And that revealed just how hollow and vulnerable the blue state economic model really is.

When you don’t have a middle class, then the tax burden falls on a very small and mobile population. Unlike the middle class, which is tethered more tightly to jobs and single homes, the sorts of people that progressives are obsessed with taxing are a less stable tax base because they are fewer and freer.

The flip side of class warfare is that your targets can fight back by leaving and leaving you with nothing.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and other blue staters want to take the same failed model nationwide. Their fantasies of a massive national tax hike try to escape the limitations of tax reform by imposing taxes that no one can escape by moving to Florida. Lefties love telling us that we should learn from Europe.

It’s a pity that they never do.

France tried out a tax on the ‘super-rich’. And they packed up and left. The failed state which has the highest tax rates in the modern world is losing its tax base. 10,000 millionaires left France in 2015. 6% of Parisian millionaires got out. 12,000 millionaires left in 2016. Many moved to the US and to the UK.

Socialists, as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher had observed, “always run out of other people’s money.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez want to take the same high taxes that devastated Massachusetts and New York nationwide. The blue state model wrecked blue states.

Saturday, March 02, 2019

In the fall of 2013, the Democrats were outraged that Republicans were blocking Obama’s nomination of Rep. Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Watt was African-American and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his minions repeatedly tried to associate the move with the Civil War.

“Republicans’ unprecedented obstruction continued today with a step that we have not seen since the Civil War, as they blocked Representative Mel Watt, a sitting member of the House of Representatives, from being confirmed to an administration position,” Reid ranted.

Senator Reid did not explain why House members should have special immunity from being filibustered or receive a special entitlement to administration positions, but everyone understood why. Watt wasn’t just anybody. He was already in Congress. He might be incompetent and unqualified. And inappropriate. But blocking unqualified and inappropriate members of Congress was unacceptable.

It hadn’t been done since the Civil War.

"I have known Mel Watt for 20 years. He is one of the smartest and finest members of Congress, an all-round good guy," Norm Ornstein gushed in The Atlantic. "The rationale that Watt was not qualified for the position was flimsy at best."

Republican opposition to Watt, a pol with "sterling credentials and moral character" was "outrageous."

Watt’s credentials were anything but sterling. He was completely unqualified to head the FHFA. And his moral character was tattered by his war against the Office of Congressional Ethics. The OCE had investigated the Democrat when he had pulled a regulatory amendment two days after a DNC fundraiser for his “reelection” campaign pulled in donations from national finance industry firms.

Rep. Watt had routinely won his elections by 60 and 70 percent in a district he couldn’t lose.

Republicans were concerned that Watt would pursue risky mortgage policies that were popular with Obama’s base, but that had contributed to the recession. Watt already had donors from national financial firms like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, and had been accused of being bought by them.

All of this made it a very bad idea to appoint him to one of the most powerful financial agencies in the country. But Watt was one of two Obama nominees who became the casus belli for Reid nuking the filibuster. If Republicans couldn’t back Watt, the argument went, the filibuster needed to go.

Reid pushed the nuclear button and Watt became the head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. And Watt repaid his Dem backers by announcing a “dramatic” shift to expand mortgages to unqualified borrowers proving that Senate Republican opposition to Watt had been based on facts, not fears.

The worst was yet to come.

Obama celebrated by declaring that Watt was “the right person to protect Americans”.

But who was going to protect Americans, especially FHFA employees, from Melvin Watt?

“If I Kissed That One, Would It Lead to More?”

Last year, Watt’s scandal breached the surface as he was serving out the end of his term. The former Democrat House member had been aggressively pursuing a woman at the agency he was running.

Watt took her to a Mexican restaurant and told her, "There is an attraction here that I think needs to be explored."

“If I kissed that one, would it lead to more?” he asked of her tattoo.

When Simone Grimes turned him down, telling him that she was already in a relationship, he told her that wasn't an issue.

"I love my wife too. Having an attraction for someone else doesn’t have to mean you don’t love them.”

"I am confident that the investigation currently in progress will confirm that I have not done anything contrary to law," Watt insisted during the investigation.

But in private, Watt apparently insisted that he shouldn’t have to participate in an investigation because he didn’t see himself as an FHFA employee and was not bound by its employee policies.

Now the results are in.

“We find that there are no circumstances under which it would be appropriate for the head of FHFA to induce a subordinate female employee to meet with him alone, in his apartment, for a conversation in which he professes his attraction for that employee and holds out opportunities for the employee to serve in specific executive positions over which he exercises total control,” the inspector general’s report states.

The 600-page report accuses Watt of misconduct and of not being candid with investigators.

"The standards have become so confused that it’s difficult to operate in them," Watt whined to them.

These were the standards that confused Watt so badly.

“So you have this conversation where you talk to her about the chief of staff position and other positions alone with her in your apartment with soft music in the background, and then tell her that she’s gorgeous, you’re attracted to her?" the investigator asked him.

The Democrat claimed that telling women they were gorgeous only meant a “friendship attraction" and that he had actually been trying to expose her attraction to him.

Nobody was buying it. Especially because Grimes had recordings of some of Watt’s conversations.

And now Watt is just another scandal in the rear-view mirror of the scandal-free Obama administration. But he occupies a unique place in history, as one of two Obama appointees who was used as a pretext for the nuclear option, but whose legacy is a reminder that some nominees should never be voted on.

A corrupt Democrat majority backed Watt and Americans, the FHFA and its employees paid the price.

The Right Man for the Job

The problem doesn’t end with Mel Watt.

His alleged victim, Simone Grimes, testified before the House Financial Services Committee that she had faced retaliation and harassment from FHFA Inspector General Laura Wertheimer.

And that Wertheimer had made her name public.

Wertheimer had started out clerking for Judge Spottswood Robinson, a Democrat hero, and was a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, the most liberal firm on the list in an analysis of law firms. (Robert Mueller, leading the Clinton coup against Trump, was another Wilmer partner.)

And she was appointed by Obama.

Since then, Wertheimer has been under investigation for witness intimidation, allegedly done under pressure from Watt. Republican concerns were proven to be valid as risky loans were once again put on the table. Whistleblower complains alleged that the Obama appointee had slashed the FHFA’s auditors, forcing them out, and ruthlessly targeted whistleblowers reporting misconduct to investigators.

In the House, Watt had tried to cut the Office of Congressional Ethics’ budgets in retaliation for its investigation of him. Now he appeared to have been doing the same thing at FHFA. The FHFA paid out six figures in settlements while whistleblowers warned of Wertheimer’s culture of fear and intimidation. And that Watt was backing risky low down-payment mortgages that would backfire on taxpayers.

Senator Democrats had killed the filibuster to unleash a reign of corruption and terror at the FHFA.

The FHFA purge of its own auditors and the corruption of its internal watchdog are huge scandals, but they flew under the radar of a media reluctant to report damaging information about Democrats. The media insists that Obama ran a “scandal-free” administration and scandals get in the way of that myth.

But then Watt and Wertheimer became caught up in something more newsworthy when the FHFA leadership decided to abuse the agency in order to protect the sexual entitlements of its boss.

Senate Democrats had argued that Melvin Watt had a right to the FHFA position because he was a member of Congress. At the FHFA, he had the right to sexually exploit employees.

"Mel Watt is the right man for the job," Senator Warren had insisted. “Congressman Watt has shown good judgment throughout it all."

“I believe Mel Watt has the vision, experience and temperament necessary," Rep. Maxine Waters had claimed at the time.

No difficult questions will be asked of Warren or Waters about why they ignored Watt’s red flags. And no one will revisit Reid’s decision to nuke the filibuster on behalf of an alleged sexual harasser.

But when we remember the downfall of the filibuster, we should not forget that it was nuked, with the eager cheers of the media and the political class who lectured us on Watt’s “sterling” character, to appoint a corrupt Democrat sexual harasser to one of the most powerful financial offices in the land.

Just ask Khalil Cavil, a Texas waiter, who raised a thousand bucks off a fake note that he wrote
himself, "We don't tip terrorist."

"I want people to understand that this racism, and this hatred still exists," he claimed.

There have been multiple cases in recent years of waiters and waitresses faking racist notes and then scoring thousands in online donations for their pain and suffering before the hoax gets exposed.

A thousand bucks for a waiter equates to the millions that an actor hoped to make from a fake hate crime. The offense is the same, the social justice banks you’re robbing just get bigger for celebrities.

A waiter scrawling, “We Hate Black People” on a check, going to the media and then collecting donations is a lot safer than faking an assault in a city with more security cameras than ethics.

Jussie broke the first rule of hate crime hoaxes. He filed a police report. At that point the stunt he might have been able to pass off as a social justice art project became a crime.

That’s what he was arrested for.

College hate crime hoaxers usually don’t file police reports. If they do, it’s to the campus cops who generally do the first part of their job and discover it’s a hoax, and then do the second part of their job and cover it up. Local cops in campus towns also often shrug and the perps walk away with no charges.

Had Jussie Smollett staged a hate crime hoax at the University of Iowa, where a student claimed that he was assaulted by three white men shouting racial slurs, he would have also gotten a pass.

Marcus Owens, the students, faced no charges so that the “community can begin to heal”. The University statement said, “We will continue to reach out to everyone involved, including Marcus, in order to provide support and assistance.”

Iowa City police Capt. Troy Kelsay suggested that he hoped that Marcus "learned a lesson from it."

The lesson is obvious. Stage fake hate crimes in Iowa City. If you don’t get caught, you win. If you do get caught, nothing will happen to you.

Iowa City is 82% white and 5% black.

Capt. Troy Kelsay and Johnson County Attorney Janet Lyness are extremely white and servicing an area that Hillary Clinton won by 65%. They know that their job is to condescendingly pat minority hate crime hoaxers on the head and thank them for starting an important conversation about racism.

Chicago is 45% white and 33% black. It has an actual police force with a history and an ethos that isn’t just there to pat drunken students on the head and keep the gownies away from the townies.

The worst possible place to fake a hate crime is in an African-American city. Black cops don’t suffer from white guilt and have very little patience for fake racist hate crimes. Chicago’s top law enforcement officials are African-American. That’s one reason Smollett is getting the book thrown at him.

He might have checked with Fynn Ajani Arthur at Goucher College who came down from Maine and decided to fake racist graffiti in Baltimore County. Artie blamed bottled up anger. The police charged him with property destruction and a hate crime.

Hate crime hoaxes are most likely to lead to criminal charges in more diverse areas with more professional police forces. If Jussie Smollett had wanted to successfully fake a hate crime, he should have gone to a lily-white leftist suburb with a police force whose main job is social justice.

The best place in America to fake a hate crime is still a campus. That’s why hate crime hoaxes occur most frequently on college campuses where they’re usually treated as victimless crimes.

Trying the same stunt in Chicago, New York or Baltimore is a bad idea.

The NYPD or the Chicago cops might not bother following up if your phone was stolen or if you were mugged on the way to work. But media coverage of a hate crime puts pressure on the cops to break the case. And they have the equipment and the training to solve the crime. They also have access to the ten trillion cameras dotting every city. And they’ll find the time to actually do more with that footage than just send out an alert with some blurry footage and move on to the next crime they don’t have time for.

And there’s nothing those cops, many of them minorities, hated more than knowing that they’re ignoring violent assaults by the dozen to pore over some celebrity’s minor assault that’s really a hoax.

The cops investigating Smollett’s lie knew exactly how many bleeding mugging victims sitting all night in an ER they had to brush off to figure out if someone had threatened a pampered celebrity.

They had a good idea from the start that it was a hoax. They were working the case to protect their own reputations, always endangered in a lefty activist city, and to nail the bastard who put them in that bind.

And they got their man.

It’s not surprising that a celebrity would have executed a hate crime hoax. The primary motivation for hate crime hoaxes is political narcissism. The average hate crime hoaxer is a college student in his late teens or early twenties whose campus radicalism and sense of alienation collide in self-dramatization.

The hate crime hoaxer has absorbed a social justice narrative in which his or her emotional insecurities are explained by microaggressions and institutional racism, whose heroes are activists who show their emotional resilience by fighting bigotry, and dramatizes his or her emotional reality with a hate crime.

The fake hate crime is the outcome of an internal conflict given a false political context by campus radicalization. Radical ideologies and cults structure individual emotional turmoil in terms of their own larger struggles. Emotionally unstable students are brainwashed to perceive their own conflicts as expressions of identity politics struggles against ‘whiteness’ or ‘heteronormativity’.

Jussie is over a decade older than the usual hate crime hoaxer, but he shared the political narcissism and the erratic emotions of the younger students who usually perpetrate these crimes.

But there’s also the financial angle.

Millennial hate crime hoaxes usually pay off most directly in the attention that the hoaxers both crave and dread. But millennials are also expert at monetizing attention, whether with GoFundMe fundraisers or job offers. Jussie Smollett’s hate crime followed the familiar millennial hate crime hoax pattern of monetizing attention with a media blitz. And in his business, celebrity, attention is money.

Just ask Colin Kaepernick.

Smollett’s mistake was forgetting that ‘hate crime’ has a crime in it. And an extremely unnecessary one.

In a social justice age of microaggressions and facecrimes where a lefty activist can gain nationwide fame for accusing a teenage boy in a red cap of smirking at him, an actual assault was never necessary.

Smollett’s error was the classic mistake of all bad actors. He overplayed the part.

All Jussie really had to do was track down a Trump supporter somewhere and claim that he was smirked at. The same media that spent tubs of ink analyzing the skin movements around the mouth area of a teenage Catholic boy at a pro-life rally would have been happy to anoint Jussie a victim of facecrime.

And who needs fake crimes when you have facecrimes?

Microaggressions make it possible to fake hate crimes that exist only in the perpetrator’s head. External evidence of political incorrectness, such as a MAGA hat or racial differences, do all the rest.

The best way to fake a hate crime isn’t with bleach and a noose. It’s to claim that the experience of the hate crime is “your truth”. That it exists not in the realm of fact and evidence that any professional police department can take apart in a matter of days, but in the orifices of your traumatized psyche.

There is no claim of emotional racial trauma too farfetched for the modern political establishment.

Under Obama, the National Park Service had hired an outreach guy who claimed that black people weren’t visiting parks because they have ancestral memories of being lynched on trees.

It’s stupid, but there’s no way short of common sense to actually disprove something in your head.

Actors may live in their heads, but celebrities, as Jussie Smollett aspired to be, live in front of mirrors. It wasn’t enough for him to invent a hate crime. As a method actor, he had to physically live it out. And, maybe, like method actors, once he experienced it, he was actually able to believe that it was true.

Leftists believe in lots of things that don’t exist and aren’t true. Like universal health care and green trains to Hawaii. They believe in them, as all cult members do, because they feel like the right thing.

And there’s no harm in believing stupid and wrong things, as long as you don’t try to make them real.

Jussie Smollett’s mistake, like that of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, another millennial political narcissist, was trying to realize the fantasies that made him feel important. As long as his “truths” were inside his head, they couldn’t be challenged, and he could rant against President Trump all he liked.

Leftist problems begin when they try to realize their fantasies.

That’s what California found out with high speed rail, Vermont found out with socialized medicine and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez found out when the Green New Deal actually had to exist on paper.

Leftism is a beautiful fantasy that becomes a nightmarish reality. What starts out with equality, ends with gulags, what begins with a green vision becomes a war on cows, and what commences with a passionate cry for social justice ends with two Nigerians pouring bleach on you in Chicago.

Like the commissars of the Soviet Union, Noam Chomsky in Cambodia and Steven Spielberg in Cuba, Jussie Smollett had finally found a truth he could believe in, even as everyone else learned it was a lie.

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

In December 2018, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a radical group supportive of terrorists, passed a display in the window of a Prada store in New York City. The display showed toy squids, aliens and monkeys that were part of the Pradamalia line, a name that combined Prada’ and ‘Animalia'. Alongside the $500 squids and aliens were two toy monkeys. One green and one red.

The green monkey named Toto wasn't a problem. But the, now banished eighth creature, a red monkey named Otto, triggered Chinyere Ezie, the CCR lawyer, whose viral post declared, " I’m shaking with anger". According to Ezie, the red monkey was a clear case of blackface imagery.

The rest of the story: outrage, hashtags (#StopBlackface #BoycottPrada #EndRacismNow) apologies, boycotts, a Prada diversity council, and a campaign accusing other luxury brands of racism is familiar.

But something much more disturbing than a toy monkey in a Soho store happened in between.

The New York City Commission on Human Rights sent a cease and desist letter to Prada, in its own words, “demanding the company immediately stop displaying and selling the ‘Pradamalia’ goods.”

The Commission's press release threatened that, "it has the authority to fine violators with civil penalties of up to $250,000 for willful and malicious violations of the Law."

A government agency issuing an order to stop displaying an artistic product (that is what Prada considered its Pradamalia collection) and threatening fines is a blatant First Amendment violation. Yet this abuse of power went largely unnoticed by the NYCLU, which these days seems to spend much of its time backing a Judeophobic campaign against Orthodox Jewish schools in the city. And while the stakes, a cartoon monkey that Prada swiftly disavowed, may seem silly, the case has ominous implications.

New York City's Human Rights Law is a sprawling and unwieldy mess, some of whose provisions would probably not survive a vigorous court challenge, and the Commission wields a disturbing amount of power, including the threat of prison for anyone who impedes its activities, but in this case it appeared to be defining speech as a discriminatory practice. And that is an attack on the First Amendment.

The Commission claims to fight for social justice, but its commitment to social justice appears to casually violate some of the most important civil rights protected by the United States Constitution.

The Prada case cast a brief gleam of light on how out of control a mostly obscure agency had become.

New York City had long ago rolled through the usual spectrum of legal protections for everyone from ex-cons to transgender men. And the Commission has been desperately concocting new legal protections. Its latest initiative declares that employers, including in the health care and food service industries, may not prevent employees, regardless of race, from wearing dreadlocks because that’s racial discrimination.

The Commission's new guidelines insist that employees have "the right to keep hair in an uncut or untrimmed state.” Schools, public and private, are also forbidden from banning dreadlocks.

Commissioner Carmelyn P. Malalis boasted that “human rights warriors” had gone on Al Jazeera to discuss hair rights. Al Jazeera is Qatar’s Islamist propaganda network. Under Islamic law, women’s hair must be covered with anything ranging from a hijab to a burka. There are no “hair rights” in Islam.

And “human rights warriors” sounds like a government agency deploying official social justice warriors.

Hair rights may sound silly, but what it really means is that restaurants will have to choose between keeping hair out of the steaks and salads of their customers, or dealing with the Commission on cases that will last for years and potentially cost the victims tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When you find a hair in your soup in a New York restaurant, you can thank the Commission.

But the Prada crackdown and hair rights had become typical of a New York City government spinning out of control under Mayor Bill de Blasio and his even more radical New York City Council counterparts.

Amazon’s pullout and the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had focused national attention on the deranged radicalism and incompetence that had become the hallmarks of New York City politics.

What does the Commission actually do?

In 2014, a “small restaurant” in Brooklyn posted an ad on Craigslist seeking an “experienced waitress who can make cappuccino”. The Commission went after the unidentified 25-seat restaurant and its minority owner because he had used “waitress” instead of “wait-person” or “wait-thing.”

The owner told the representative of the Commission that he hadn’t done anything wrong and hung up the phone. He did not show up at any of the hearings and showed no interest in the kangaroo court.

In 2015, an administrative law judge held him liable for gender discrimination. Since Mr. Rosario didn’t show up, the Commission insisted he should be punished, "primarily because of the important public interest in ensuring cooperation with the Commission's administrative investigation and hearing processes."

The final order was signed by Commissioner Carmelyn P. Malalis three years after the original offense. Malalis has a B.A. in Women's Studies from Yale and a seemingly boundless hatred for restaurants.

A previous order had hit Crazy Asylum, a restaurant, accused of also putting up a Craigslist ad for “waitresses” who could wear heels, with a $10,000 fine after wasting four years on this case. “Respondents were not sufficiently deterred from posting another advertisement indicating a limitation on gender even after they had received the Bureau's Complaint,” the Malalis order fumed.

The inmates, with their degrees in Women’s Studies, were officially in charge of the asylum.

Also facing the Commission’s wrath was an Indian restaurant which had put out an ad for an Indian waiter or waitress back in 2013. The Commission conducted a sting operation by sending an email job application for “George Harris” and “using an email add-on that confirms when an email has been opened by the recipient, the tester confirmed that both emails were opened. However, the tester did not receive a response to either job application.” Would that hold up in court? Welcome to New York.

George, who didn’t exist, didn’t get the job. Neither did anyone else because the job no longer exists.

The Indian restaurant shut down, but the case kept going with a penalty finally issued four years later. Once again, Commissioner Malalis declared that, “Respondents' failure to cooperate with the Bureau investigation and to participate in the OATH hearing process necessitates the imposition of civil penalties.” The worst crime the Commission can think of isn’t racism: it’s ignoring the Commission.

However, all the managerial staff for the Indian restaurant that doesn’t exist were ordered to attend a Commission-led training that will teach them it’s wrong to hire Indians to work at Indian restaurants.

The Indian restaurant and the jobs of all its employees had to be destroyed for social justice.

Meanwhile two Muslim taxi drivers, Baqir Raza and Mohammed Dahbi, who discriminated against a black woman and a lesbian couple, got off with no fines. Instead, even though their alleged actions were actually discriminatory, in the interests of “restorative justice”, a euphemism that means giving minority offenders a pass, they were instead ordered to educate other drivers about the evils of discrimination.

The Commission had spoken.

Under Republican governance, New York City began a major turnaround. What made that turnaround possible was a crackdown on crime and quality of life issues, along with creating an environment that encouraged businesses to stay in New York, and attracted new companies to do business there.

All of these three factors were reversed under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Term limits, instead of reforming government, pushed out professional politicians and replaced them with motivated radicals. Policing was once again crippled and quality of life offenses became protected behavior on its streets.

New York City is steadily bleeding people. Beyond the established financial and cultural industries, few companies want to deal with a deranged regulatory environment run by incompetent radical activists.

Amazon couldn’t make it in New York. Smaller companies don’t even want to try.

The New York City Commission on Human Rights is both ridiculous and disturbing, a Kafkaesque monstrosity exercising dubious powers for radical ends, holding its own hearings, inventing its own laws and spitefully punishing small businesses who dare to ignore the radical agendas of its identity politics.

New Yorkers needs some human rights activists to save them from their Commission on Human Rights.